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Are You Switching to 64-bit Processors?
chip_whisperer asks: "I used to be a big time custom desktop builder, making many working boxes per year, but I've been off the bandwagon for about four years now and am trying to get back into it now that Ars Technica has just released their recommendations. The standard seems to be heading towards 64-bit processors, but I'm wondering if it worth it to run a box on XP-64? I've heard that driver support for 64-bit processors can be a hassle. Also, for you fellow Linux geeks, how are current distros (like Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, and others) doing in supporting 64 bit processors?"
I'm using ~amd64 and have had no problems whatsoever related to 64-bit compatibility (though if I wanted to install a 32-bit driver, that could change). A few apps, such as Firefox, needed to be 32-bit because of things like the Flash plugin, but for the most part everything is 64-bit.
It's natural that Gentoo would be good at this, considering it's a source-based distribution.
XP-64 seems to have all sorts of driver problems that are unlikely to go away as Vista comes out.
Vista-64 has the problem that you've got the uncertain future of a heavily DRMed machine. This may or may not prove to be a show-stopper, so I'd say wait and see..
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
That's not entirely true. The new 64 bit extensions also added 8 new registers. That doesn't necessarily speed up most apps, but they do allow for more function parameters to be passed in registers. Theoretically it could reduce the number of memory accesses required, too.
otoh, a lot of science people want double floats and 64 bit words, but look at the big boys, nvidia. it may bite them in the @#$@# someday, but for now they're sticking to a strong party line: 32bit floating point is sufficient. this works alright for video cards & games, since 4 channels of 32bit fp is an 128bit fp buffer. thats large, but still not entirely that accurate. i'd like to see a time when even game worlds are so massive they straight up require 64bit fp.
Graphics cards usually stay with 32-bit floats because they're "good enough." For 32-bit RGBA color, four 32-bit floats get shoved into 32-bits for display, so a whole 32-bits per component is already overkill. Position data is a little different, but adding more bits still wouldn't make much of a difference.
Scientific programs already use 64-bit and higher floating point. GCC, for example, offers the "-m128bit-long-double" compiler switch to use 128-bits for the "long double" type. For x86_64 GCC uses 128-bit long doubles by default.
Maybe not
I have been using Debian-amd64 for bit over a year now. In my benchmarks, the 64-bitness definitely helps performance; e.g. LAME (the mp3 encoder) is 50 % faster when compiled for amd64 than the x86 version.
I'm running Debian unstable, and I think things break a bit more often for 64-bit architectures than 32-bit. For example, recently apt-get source broke on 64-bit architectures. I think there are enough people however running 64-bit Debian to ensure no such flaws ever get to testing or stable. If you don't like to tinker with things like these, you obviously shouldn't run unstable.
There are some issues you might want to consider. I think there still is no Flash plugin, should you want that (I wouldn't install it on my computer if I could). Wine doesn't work, neither does MPlayer support win32 codecs. Also OpenOffice was for years very badly broken on 64-bit architechures (apparently it had so much hardcoded 32-bitisms). Debian unstable (and possibly testing?) has recently gained a 64-bit OpenOffice. I would assume it's still not quite as stable as a 32-bit version, but it's definitely getting there. I run MPlayer from a 32-bit chroot, that works nicely but is a bit of a hassle. I also run OpenOffice from the chroot, but that's just a relic from the times when there was no working 64-bit OO, so I can't comment on the stability of the 64-bit version.
Overall I'm very happy with amd64-Debian.
Oh yeah, the flash player. No you're right it doesn't work in 64bit. Can't say I miss it though. All it does is enable annoying ads on webpages. I usually regret installing it everytime I do. I think that the mplayer plugin is working though. Java is working but somewhat crashy.
Amd64 is an experimental system, so not everything is as fully supported as in regular x86. I can live with it. I have been considering rebuilding a small 32bit x86 system too to play older commercial Linux games, but its pretty low priority. I really haven't tried the 32bit emulation libs so I can't say one way or another but I'd assume some kind of performance hit would be involved.
Clickety Click
would going to 64 bit solve these problems, though?